The Education of Henry Adams
by Henry Adams
Summary
Henry Adams, grandson and great grandson of two presidents, tells his own life story in the third person, watching a character named Henry Adams fail again and again to receive an education equal to the world he is trying to understand. The book opens with a Boston boyhood steeped in Puritan discipline and family expectation, moves through Harvard, where Adams found the formal curriculum nearly useless, and follows him to London, where he served as secretary to his father, the American minister to Britain, during the tense years of the Civil War when a wrong diplomatic step might have brought Britain into the conflict on the Confederate side.
Adams skips almost entirely over his own marriage and the 1885 death of his wife, Clover, leaving a twenty year gap in the narrative that a reader only gradually notices, and the book instead spends its second half on his encounters with a rapidly changing world of science and technology that his classical education never prepared him to read. Its most famous chapter sets Adams before the great dynamos at the 1900 Paris Exposition, machines he finds himself regarding the way earlier centuries regarded the Virgin, a private education in force and acceleration that the book uses to argue history itself was speeding up faster than any single mind, however well trained, could keep pace with.
Reading it means following a mind arguing with itself in the third person, ironic and self mocking about its own failures, and a reader used to conventional autobiography may find the missing middle years and the abstract theorizing about historical acceleration difficult footing at first. It suits anyone drawn to a genuinely strange, restless account of American intellectual life at the turn of the twentieth century, written by a man determined to prove that his own supposedly excellent education left him unequipped for the century he actually had to live in.
Historical Context & Significance
Adams privately printed a small run of the book in 1907 for friends and never released it commercially in his lifetime. He died in March 1918, and Houghton Mifflin published the book publicly that same year; the Pulitzer board awarded it the 1919 Prize for Biography the year after his death, one of the earliest instances of the prize honoring a book its own author never saw reach a general audience.
The book's reputation has only grown since, and the Modern Library later ranked it first on its list of the hundred best English language nonfiction books of the twentieth century. Historians have also noted that the older, more settled Adams who narrates the book sometimes contradicts positions the younger Adams actually held, a reminder that the education it describes is filtered through decades of hindsight rather than delivered as it happened.